One of the main reasons people seem to be so keen for “Marco Polo” to be returned to the archives is that everything points to it looking superb. There are possibly more photos of this story than of any other missing set of episodes, with huge numbers of them in colour that show off the sets and costumes fantastically. In more than one or two cases they also show up the very non-21st century casting choices but that’s a blog post for another day. My problem though is that we have the audio of “Marco Polo” and, either as an unnarrated recon (of which there are many) or as a narrated audio only CD release, I’ve always found it a slog to get through. I’ve tried it one episode a day, one a week, all in one sitting, the edited down version on the DVD release of “The Edge of Destruction” and every time I’ve really struggled to get through to the end. It’s possibly because there’s only one character in it that I have any sympathy for (Ping Cho) and it’s possibly because it is so very repetitive but, whatever the reason, I’ve always wanted it to end quickly so I can get onto more interesting stories. Which is where this blog entry comes in, as it’s a chance for me to raise a whole load of questions about the opening scenes (and a few that take place in later episodes). You see, in my mind, there’s no reason for this story to actually take place and it relies on something that bugs me about a lot of drama (not just Doctor Who, honest). The plot seems to rely on people being very stupid, purely to force the story to happen. Sitting comfortably? Then get ready for everything that’s wrong with the opening of “Marco Polo”.
If you’ve not experienced the story in any format well firstly I’m jealous and, secondly/more importantly, the very brief summary is that after the events of “The Edge of Destruction”, the TARDIS has set down in a snow covered environment, Susan tries to trick us into thinking we’re going to get something like the Yeti, Ian uses his science knowledge to explain her fears away (yay science!) and then even more parts of the TARDIS stop working. Fortunately though, they’re able to befriend a passing historical celebrity (see, nuWho wasn’t the first to do it) and thus also enable Barabara to remind us that she’s a historian. And all the while the Doctor tries to repair the ship. So, I hear you ask, what’s the problem? The problem is that John Lucarotti seemingly doesn’t give too much thought to just exactly how the TARDIS breaks down and, specifically, he’s very specific about which bits don’t work. The Doctor bemoans the fact that the lighting’s gone out, there’s no water and the heating’s stopped working. Oh… is that all? To me, that doesn’t seem like a particularly catastrophic list of problems, more a mild inconvenience. Let’s put ourselves in the Doctor’s shoes and let’s start with the lights.
Right, so it’s dark in the TARDIS. This really isn’t a problem. In fact it’s such a non-problem that the Doctor is still able to work inside the TARDIS during the course of the story and repair the faulty circuits to get the lights working. This, in turn, suggests that there are other sources of light inside the ship. Right through the 60 year history we see the Doctor use a variety of torches from slim line button operated ones (such as the one we errrr saw last week in “Edge of Destruction”) through to chunky black things with big beams of light. Plus, let’s face it, it’s the TARDIS. We know he didn’t have a spare supply of mercury on board but really, not even a candle or two to get things going whilst he cobbles something together? That’s not even factoring in that he’s a traveller in time and space, has a weird collection of things laying around the ship yet doesn’t have a single high tech means of lighting up his room? No matter how much the Doctor protests, I just don’t buy into the lack of light being in any way, shape or form a problem. What about the other two, the water issue and the heating? Even Ian realises that water isn’t a problem, they’re surrounded by snow and, given they’re on the roof of the world, it’s not snow that’s likely to be particularly contaminated in any way and will be safe to melt and drink. No, the real problem is sheer stupidity. Heating, water and light… not, for example, the engines. Not, for example, the dimensional control or the ship is full of mercury vapour. It’s just a bit dark and a bit nippy in there. Yes, I know it’s for drama’s sake, but couldn’t they just all jump back in the TARDIS, throw on an extra jumper or two and take off for warmer climes? Note that the next place they DO land is on a warm beach, so no need to worry there! Well, except for the weird creatures in rubber suits but that’s for next time.
Well, it turns out there might be a real reason they couldn’t just move on but I’ll come back to that when I get to “The Reign of Terror” (a story I love so much I’d rather write about “Marco Polo” again than it!). No, the sad truth is that no-one in the production team looked at the script and thought “These don’t seem like particularly major faults, perhaps we should do something about that”. Yes, making it up as they go along blah blah blah. Yes, tight production turn around. But really? No one stopped to put in maybe one extra line of dialogue to make the peril more convincing? We know the TARDIS has a well equipped wardrobe (Barbara especially seems to have raided it a few times, obviously not being a fan of the Thal trousers) so are you really telling me that there weren’t enough hoods and anoraks in there to keep them warm for a bit whilst the Doctor fixed the circuit? And, once more, are you really telling me that along with no decent means of providing light, there wasn’t any method of generating heat inside the ship too? Just get a metal bucket or two, bung a few books from the library in it and set fire to them? Surely that’s got to warm up a room or two? Okay, so maybe not if the TARDIS library is full of kindles but you get the idea.
Which leads me to the other real problem I have with the excuse of the heating circuit not working. The TARDIS is (all together now) bigger on the inside than the outside and this brings with it a whole load of questions about the thermal nature of the ship that will cause a few problems further down the line as well. Just exactly how powerful is the heating system in the ship (as well as, seemingly, being a powerful air conditioning unit) and why does it even need one? To explain the problem, let’s go inside the ship and close the double doors behind us. We’re standing in the control room (the exact size of which will be the subject of a blog eventually) there are banks of computers along one wall (they don’t seem too energy efficient so surely they’re throwing out a load of heat anyway), there’s an alcove which currently contains the food machine (even if they’re out of water I’m guessing they can still access hot food… either that or the bacon and eggs that Ian ate in “The Dead Planet” were at room temperature!), there’s the living quarters and, although we haven’t seen them up to this stage, we can add in a bathroom/wash area (they clean themselves up at the end of “An Unearthly Child”), an extensive wardrobe (mentioned in “The Edge of Destruction”) and definitely some sort of work area and storage for spares (let’s just call it a lab). At this stage of the series, we don’t know too much about the rest of the ship but it seems reasonable to assume there are probably a couple of extra rooms we don’t know about. Not an infinitely large space yet but certainly not the same as the small interior of a Police Box. That’s quite a lot of air and space that’s holding quite a bit of heat for us (that’s why I said to close the double doors, let’s not risk a draft). Why, once it’s warmed up inside (which presumably it had done routinely as Ian doesn’t mind wandering around in his dressing gown), do we think it’s suddenly going to get very cold just because there’s a bit of snow outside? Where is that heat going to go? We might be tempted to think “Oh, it leaks away through the walls to the outside world” but there’s an interesting side effect to this line of thinking. Selecting some hypothetical numbers at random. Suppose the surface area of the four sides of the police box comes to 8m2. Given the size of the control room and the list of rooms we’ve already accounted for, let’s suppose the total area of the “outside” walls of the inside of the ship comes to 800m2. This means that the inside walls are 100 times bigger than the outside ones. So whatever thermal energy is leaking out through the walls on the inside will get condensed into an area 100 times smaller. This means that the outside of the police box should be considerably hotter than room temperature. Yet no one who touches the Police Box ends up with third degree burns. Similarly, when the Police Box exterior is bobbing around in the vacuum of space or the whatever it is that makes up the vortex, there’s no indication that the Doctor has massive space heaters hidden away somewhere to stop the interior matching the exterior of space (because, as soon as the ship landed, if there were glowing red hot things laying around, the interior would get very hot VERY quickly whilst they cooled down). Okay, it might be nice to have a little bit of control over the temperature inside the ship, regenerate during an adventure and your new body might decide it likes it warmer than the old one but only by a couple of degrees.
And whilst we’re talking about the inside of the TARDIS… just how humid does the Doctor keep it in there? A few episodes into the story, just as the water is running out in Marco’s caravan, seemingly enough condensation forms on the inside walls of the TARDIS in one night to quench everyone’s thirst. This seems just a tiny bit excessive but it does at least explain how the food machine has a regular supply of water.
No, the sad truth of the matter is that for “Marco Polo” to work as a story, we have to accept the fact that the Doctor is seemingly very stupid and, for some reason, doesn’t think to just tell everyone to get onboard and they’ll go somewhere else. I guess the Doctor’s genius doesn’t extend to common sense and that’s going to be a running theme through all 60 years! So just exactly where does the Doctor’s genius lay? “Marco Polo” gives us another clue as to the Doctor’s (seeming) specialism. So far he’s thought nothing of carrying a geiger counter around with him and can do all kinds of soil analysis without too much effort. In episode three, “Five Hundred Eyes”, the Doctor is able to recognise quartz by sight and also gets so carried away wanting to talk about it that he forgets that he’s supposed to be rescuing Barbara. There’s plenty more evidence to talk about by the end of season two, but it’s definitely looking likely that the Doctor is a geologist/mineralogist and gets his intellectual kicks not from electronics (which, admittedly, he seems to be very good at) but he gets his rocks off from errrrr rocks. Though it’s not stated that they went there in person, Susan also seems very familiar with the metal seas of Venus which would probably also be fascinating to the Doctor (and if they were there in person, that suggests that they’ve got space suits in the TARDIS that can deal with temperature issues, see earlier…). Mind you, even though she was seemingly on the Earth for 5 months before we met her, Susan claims not to have seen a moon lit night, so perhaps we should take everything that she says as being “differently accurate”.
Yes, it’s got a huge canvas to work with (as opposed to the usual tiny portion of a planet that we usually see), but “Marco Polo” still manages to find hundreds of tiny ways to get things irritatingly wrong, historians especially will have a field day with the historical “accuracy” of the guest cast and languages used. So it’s a good job that the next story takes a potentially even larger canvas and errrrr makes us forget the small problems in “Marco Polo” by providing a huge array of large ones to worry about instead.